When a winter storm strikes, like it did in Cincinnati last night, it’s a good time to evaluate the logistics of your business.
Any stressful situation brings some dormant problems to the surface. It can really be anything: late deadlines, key team members sick, hardware failure, you name it. The winter storm is a situation when many of your workers can end up under a “house arrest”.
Since you can’t “fix” Mother Nature, you might as well use this situation to your advantage. Make lemonade, so to speak.
So some of your team members are stuck at home. Not a big deal – that happened before, just not in such proportions.
Here comes the moment when the old issues start to resurface:
- There are a bunch of emails going around with long CCs. The email traffic skyrockets.
- John can’t locate a file. More emails follow, now with file attachments. Some emails bounced back and there is a discussion about the latest version of the file.
- Jimmy can’t access the intranet. VPN? No, he never bothered to set it up, and your technicians are guiding him through. Phone conversation follows.
- Tracy needs a quick report for a client with the projects status. Right now? Could that client pick a better time?
Familiar scenario? I’m sure you can add more to this list.
The root of all this “winter storm mess” is not in the weather most of the time. Weather happens. Maybe it’s because:
- Your team is used to having frequent live meetings, and managers casually stop by your cubicle every time they have a question. It works well and creates a friendly environment, you think. But as the complexity grows, you may find out that you communicate too much, because you don’t communicate efficiently.
- You lack a central repository where users can share files, add comments, and see where everybody is. Much less emails are needed when you have such a system in place.
- Your activities are not logged in one place, so reports can?t be generated on the fly. Your clients can’t pull this information either, since there is no place for them to go for it.
- You are still stuck with a complex Sharepoint beast that was never fully tamed, and it just drains your IT resources.
If that’s the case, maybe it’s time for you to look into a web-based project management solution. Here are just a few benefits:
- No infrastructure needed, no hardware, and no IT team to support it
- You have a central location for your projects, tasks, files and communication. It can be accessed from anywhere using a web browser
- You can give your clients some access to that information, so they can pull it up themselves instead of asking you to push it to them every time
In the financial storm most of us are in now, this can not only reduce operation costs, but also help getting the best from the resources you already have – you team.
These things are difficult to measure on an everyday basis, but they do add up.
Visit our website and check 5pm – our project management solution developed for team like yours.